A sure fire way to affect change in a difficult emotional thinking pattern is to state it. Give it voice. Put it into words, whether spoken or written. And sure enough, whatever beliefs that arise out of that exercise will suddenly dissolve; especially if that belief was not formed from a rational headspace.
I don't know why that is. But it is why I write in this blog. And it is why I need to keep doing it and continue to give voice to whatever is on my mind regardless if it's rational or not. Because, for whatever reason, only writing in my private journal seems to have stopped resulting in parsing the jumble of thoughts in my mind. This writing, this blog, has been necessary for me because of one basic thing, the awareness that what I write has the potential of actually getting read by someone. That truth changes my entire thought process. I don't even need to know who reads it or when, just that the words I write are going to end up in a place that can be found and read. Without that concept of "public", I don't seem to be motivated to process any thoughts at all. My private journal writing has essentially turned into an exercise in avoidance.
So here I am, putting more time in to free-writing publicly about my journal writing being an avoidance mechanism so that it will dissolve and go back to being a catharsis. Wait, isn't the awareness of what I'm writing about change the scope and purpose and end up sabotaging it? Damn it!
Nonetheless, I still want to take a moment here to state something about a post from a few weeks ago (April 7). It was a post that exposed more about me and my messed up state of mind at the time I wrote it than it did about anything or anyone I was whining about.
It's real, it's how I was feeling at the time, I can't deny that, but there are parts of it that are big red flags to me that I was not rational. But in order to discover this, I had to forget about the post for a few weeks, finish a story I had been working on for a year, write a follow up post to that story, and then, by chance, go back and read the old post and realize that I was not resonating with whoever it was that wrote it! Yeah, I wrote it but, I don't really know the person who wrote it. Does that make me schizophrenic? Not really, but it does expose how depression manifests itself to me.
So, what do I want to say about the old post? Not much other than to say that the feelings of isolation and loneliness, and the belief that I've been the recipient of judgments and rejection, have actually been ME doing most of the judgments and rejecting. In turn, I've ended up imposing more isolation on myself, well beyond the physical isolation that I actually can't control right now. Yes, the communities are generally dogmatic, cliquish and exclusionary, but that's over generalizing and unfair to the many individuals in the communities who are not that way and disrespectful to those who desire and need such closed door policies. I mustn't forget that what seems like a clique is actually a close nit family. One just doesn't walk into someone's family and expect to be treated as if you were always there. It takes time, lots of interaction and the right chemistry. And if it doesn't happen, it's OK. It wasn't meant to be. The problem I face is that I so rarely get interaction I never get the chance to ever know where I stand.
Now, quite honestly, at this point, I need to be careful here because dwelling on my current physical isolation is one of the many major triggers that have literally shoved me into the hell of depression. And even though I'm aware of how depression manifests itself at this moment in time, it doesn't mean I will recognize if and when I fall into it again. So, will stating what I just stated mean that I will recognize it next time? That's the expectation. But now I just stated that the stating of it will now change its outcome. Damn it!
